Every Wednesday. Without Fail. Words Will Be Hated.

Here at We Hate Words Towers, we are editors and writers. We spend all day every day working with words, and they don’t half get on our tits sometimes.

“When”, “amongst”, “biscuits”. What kind of words are they? Really.

Spellings that ludicrous should be outlawed. Ambiguous meanings should be outlawed. Names that don’t sound right should be outlawed. Pontefract should be outlawed, or at least sent back to Wales, where it belongs.

We Hate Words is a weekly magazine about rubbish words. We’ll show you ours if you show us yours.

Ah yes. I see now. I’m still not changing it. It’s big enough, and ugly enough, to look after itself.

The Scrabble thing is unlikely because although you could build ‘dis’ and ‘ment’ off ‘establish’, ‘establish’ itself is 9 letters long and very unlikely to turn up in a game of Scrabble. I suppose you could work up from ‘ta’, which would give you a 50 point bonus for using all your tiles but-

Wait! You don’t catch me that easily. Ignore all that. I don’t know about Scrabble. I hate words!

I hate the pronunciation of words, what that does to words. I hate it that the conservative in my family has to mispronounce Obama’s name. She has to say O-ba-BA-ma each time. She knows she’s doing it wrong. I hated the talking head TV anchors in the 70s who read the news in a very flat, uninflected way except for the word “Nicaragua”–which they said very quickly and with the accent spun just right as though they were native Spanish speakers from that country and on the side of the rebels. They knew they were doing it right–but only this word? I hate it when I don’t know how to pronounce a word but then others who don’t know how either just launch into it with confidence and I’m fooled into thinking they know it, and I learn to say it wrong. Horrors.

Not sure if antidisestablishmentarianism was made up for Scrabble or not, but it does refer to a particular group of people – particularly in early-20th Century Wales – who opposed moves to break the link between the state and the Church of England/Church in Wales. The CiW was disestablished, which seemed fair enough given that most Welsh people were chapel-goers.

So it has its place…

This could be a lot of fun.
I like defenestrate, and knackarsch: a German word for a perfectly pinchable bottom (even though I’d never dream of pinching anybody’s bottom).

We Don’t Really Hate Words

We Hate Words is a weekly magazine about rubbish words.

Don't get us wrong; we don't hate all words. We're writers, so that would be foolhardy. However, there are some words that just stir up trouble. We're here to take those words outside into a dark back alley and rough them up a bit.

So if there's a word you hate, tell us. Think of us as your therapist. We will listen.

Who Are These Darn Word-haters?

Sarah-Clare Conlon is an editor, writer and adventuress. She writes arts blog Words & Fixtures and saucy short stories. She foolishly put herself forward to edit this site. You can stalk her on Twitter via @wordsnfixtures.

Benjamin Judge is the founder of We Hate Words. He abandoned it on the edge of the city in a tattered fruit box. He hears rumours about how it is under new management, but he pays little attention to rumours.

Clare and Ben are two of the five people behind the Flash Mob Writing Competition & Literary Salon and the FlashTag anthology Quickies: Short Stories For Adults, featuring flash fiction from the likes of David Gaffney, Emma Jane Unsworth, Chris Killen, Socrates Adams and Tania Hershman.

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